Best Forza Motorsport Settings for Thrustmaster TMX / T150

Forza Motorsport continues very much in the tradition of the Forza series, creating a fairly nice balance between simulation and arcade accessibility. It always takes some time to adjust to the Forza physics, but once you do and get the force feedback tuned properly, it actually feels quite good.

The Thrustmaster TMX and T150 work very well, though the default settings make the wheel much too heavy. This is easily fixed with a few settings changes.

With so many cars of wildly different types, it's difficult to find the perfect settings for every one. These settings have worked well for all the cars I've tried, but you may need to tweak them if certain cars don't feel right.

In this guide, we will first look at the settings you need to set in the Thrustmaster Control Panel, if playing on a PC. Then we will look at the in-game settings to improve the force feedback.

Thrustmaster Control Panel Settings

Forza Motorsport has a Soft Lock feature and makes it easy to set the proper steering angle per car in-game, meaning you can leave the rotation set to the maximum in the Thrustmaster Control Panel. Console players can ignore this entirely.

Spring and Damper control the Center Spring and Wheel Damper settings in Forza Motorsport.

BOOST should always be turned off. For an in-depth look as to why, see my BOOST Force Feedback Analysis.

Forza Motorsport Settings

In Settings > Driving Assists:

There is quite a lot of confusion about whether to set the Steering Assist to Normal or Simulation. When you are using a gamepad, the Normal Assist does some magic to adjust the input as well as the physics to make steering easier. When you are using a wheel, only the physics changes apply, nothing happens to your actual inputs. In Simulation mode, both the input and the physics changes are removed entirely for both gamepad and wheel.

In Settings > Advanced Input:

Steering Axis Deadzone Inside should be set to 0 or there will be an area around the center of the wheel that will have no input recognized.

Steering Axis Deadzone Outside should be set to 100 to use the full range of the wheel's rotation.

Vibration Scale vibrates the wheel when you lose traction. This can be useful since it makes it very obvious if you are sliding, but it can get annoying if it's set too high. You may even want to turn it off completely. If this is set much under 40, it becomes very difficult to feel.

Force Feedback Scale is the overall strength of forces. You will need to change this on a per-car basis using the Tune Car menu. You can check if the force feedback is clipping by pressing down on the d-pad and navigating to the FFB Telemetry page.

Self Steering Alignment is the main force feedback you feel. Setting this too high will overwhelm the wheel and make the wheel very heavy.

Mechanical Trail Scale is lowered to make the force feedback a little sharper and more responsive. This helps you feel when your tires have lost grip.

Pneumatic Trail Scale lets you feel the tires load up as you reach the grip limit. You will feel the wheel get heavier as you push the tires.

Road Feel Scale controls the vibrations you feel from bumps in the road surface. This is quite light, so feel free to raise this if you want more of that feedback.

Load Sensitivity brings out the more of the tire feel in the force feedback.

Wheel Damper Scale adds some weight to the wheel. This is not needed on these wheels.

Center Spring Scale pulls the wheel back to the center position. This doesn't seem to have much effect.

In Car > Tune Car > Steering Wheel:

It's important to set a proper steering angle for the car you are driving. By default, Forza will use the full rotation of your wheel for every car you drive, which is way too high for most of them.

Thankfully, you can set the wheel rotation angle for each car individually. I typically use 720° for road cars, 540° for rally-style cars and 360° for F1-style cars, but if there are some cars you really like, you can always find the real-world steering angle and set it perfectly.

Conclusion

Besides some pretty bad glitches and crashes I've had with this game, I've enjoyed it so far. It's never going to feel perfect, since it has elements of simulators and arcade games in it. That's an awkward balance to find, but I think they've done a good job of it.

Let me know if you have any questions or comments.